This invention relates to protective shields usable on conventional cooking stoves to prevent small children from reaching the stove burners or cooking containers located on the burners. The general aim is to prevent small children from burning themselves, either through direct hand contact with the burners or through a process of pulling a heated container off of the stove.
Protective shields have already been proposed U.S. Pat. No. 4,517,955 to C. Ehrlich shows a shield positionable at the front edge of a stove to prevent small children from reaching the stove burners. The shield is held onto the stove by means of permanent magnets or by clamping bars having hooked ends engageable on edge areas of burner openings in the stove top wall.
The attachment methods disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,517,955 are believed to be disadvantageous in some respects. Permanent magnets may not always be fully resistive to pulling forces exerted by small children on the shield. The use of clamping bars tends to restrict full usage of the stove in that the bars occupy stove counter space that could otherwise be used to support cooking containers. Also the attachment devices shown in U.S. Pat. No. 4,517,955 are relatively complex. They may not be cost effective from a marketing standpoint.
The present invention contemplates a relatively low cost shield construction that is rigidly and firmly attachable to a conventional stove. The shield structure may be removed from the stove when necessary, e.g., should the homeowner sell or discard the stove, or when there are no longer any small children in the home. The shield construction is spaced from the stove surface, such that it does not tend to heat up (due to heat conduction from the stove surface).
In devising my invention, I noticed that conventional stove-oven units of the free-standing type or built-in type, have at least two attachment screws for connecting the oven to a reversely turned flange on the stove front wall. I have concluded that these attachment screws can be effectively used as devices for mounting a protective shield in front of the stove-oven unit.
A preferred form of my invention comprises an upstanding panel adapted to assume an upright position in front of a stove. The panel has sufficient horizontal length that it can span substantially the entire width of the stove. The upper edge of the upright panel is located two or more inches above the plane of the stove top wall. The lower edge of the upright panel is located approximately at the same level as the upper edge of the oven opening.
The upright panel is attached to the stove by means of two L-shaped brackets located at opposite ends of the panel. Each bracket includes a horizontal leg (plate) that extends from the lower edge of the panel into overlapment with flanged areas at the stove-oven interface. Slots in the horizontal legs of the brackets accommodate the aforementioned attachment screws, thereby rigidly attaching the shield to the stove structure. The shield can be removed from the stove by temporarily unscrewing the attachment screws.